Wednesday, 30 November 2011

Climate change debate remains close to home

It appears there is already a cooling of
relations between some of the countries at this year’s UN climate change summit in Durban, South
Africa, which started this week. There is
significant disagreement on fairly fundamental principles, such as when talks
should start on a new global emissions agreement. India
and Brazil
– both significant contributors in terms of emissions – are the latest countries
to say they do not want to start talks before 2015, while other countries,
including the EU block and smaller, developing nations, would like to see a
deal finalised by then.

Meanwhile, “rich”
countries such as Japan, Russia and Canada
are refusing to commit to targets under the Kyoto Protocol – adopted at the
summit in Japan
in December 1997 – which should have been met by next year. This was a set of
binding targets calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions amounting
to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over
the five-year period 2008-2012.

The ultimate aim of
the summit is to form an agreement that can constrain greenhouse gas
emissions enough to keep the global average temperature rise below 2⁰C. This
will be no mean feat with so many countries involved with different opinions
and, of course, the whole science behind climate change being such a young one.

In the beef and
sheep sector it is fair to say there is still a degree of scepticism about
climate change. This can lead some to dismiss it and continue with “business as
usual”. However, this is not an option and we do need to address the challenge
to reduce our emissions. The simple fact is that the Government believes in it
and so has set targets via the Low Carbon Transition Plan, backed up by the
targets in the industry-led Greenhouse Gas Action Plan (GHGAP) that we must
strive to meet. If not, the reality is that legislation and regulation may
follow to force farmers to make changes.

EBLEX has taken a
lead in this work. As well as being prominent in the GHGAP project, it has
already published two reports under our environmental roadmap banner
benchmarking where we are in terms of emissions and energy use, and exploring
practical ways that these figures can be reduced. You can find both of these
reports here.
These practical measures for change are being delivered through our Better Returns Programme.

We are currently
finalising content for the third chapter of our roadmap for the beef and sheep
meat sector, which we expect to publish in January 2012. This will include the
biggest yet on-farm data set, which backs up figures from previous years,
showing similar trends and ranges of emissions. It also picks out characteristics
of high and low carbon farms, allowing people to look at their own business and
see where they might be under-performing.

It also involves
sections from the main multiple retailers examining how they are working with
their beef and lamb supply chains to improve environmental efficiency, while a
further section looks at the issue of carbon sequestration – how land grazed by
livestock has a positive effect on emissions by sucking carbon out of the
atmosphere and storing it.

In the run up to
the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen,
it is fair to say that livestock farming was the scapegoat for climate change.
It appeared everyone was suggesting that reducing meat consumption and
therefore livestock numbers, would bring the necessary emissions cuts in one
foul swoop. The reality is this would do nothing to improve efficiency, would
adversely affect food security and any food producing enterprise which replaced
it would have its own negative GHG affect. We would also lose the huge benefits
that grazing livestock bring to the countryside, not just as a carbon sink but
also in terms of landscape value and making the most efficient use of land that
could not realistically be used for anything else in terms of food production.

So we are
watching the debates in Durban
with interest but should not lose sight of the measures already identified that
can make an impact on our own carbon footprint.